Michael Zolensky
The NASA curator of cosmic dust who found liquid water from an asteroid inside salt crystals in the Monahans meteorite.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Cosmic mineralogist and curator
Michael E. Zolensky is a mineralogist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he has long been in charge of the collection of cosmic dust, tiny particles gathered in the upper atmosphere by high-flying aircraft.
In March 1998 a stony meteorite fell in Monahans, Texas, landing near boys playing basketball. When Zolensky and his colleagues cut it open, they found tiny purple and blue crystals of halite, ordinary rock salt, scattered inside. Within some crystals were minute bubbles of liquid brine, water that had been trapped when the salt grew on the meteorite's parent asteroid more than 4 billion years ago. In 1999 they reported the first liquid water found in a meteorite.
Zolensky has also studied grains of comet Wild 2 brought back by the Stardust mission, the asteroid samples from Itokawa and Ryugu, and the fragments of Almahata Sitta. He has shown that many meteorites contain small fragments of quite different meteorites, carried in from other parent bodies by collisions.
He has worked to make the curation of space samples as clean as possible, so that what scientists measure comes from space and not from Earth.